Machines that talk back

Press, 20 April 1982, Page 27

Machines that talk back

A weighing machine that talks back to you is a practical reality with today's silicon chip technology. National Semiconductor, who manufactures a speech chip set called the Digitalker, has just expanded the vocabulary of their chip set to 274 words (spoken in a male voice). This adds 131 words to the previous version of the Digitalker.

With such new words as “secure," “switch,” “first,” “floor,” and "button,” National Semiconductor’s vocabulary can address the needs of many consumer and industrial applications. The new vocabulary is housed in two 64K-bit ROMs and is managed by a processor chip.

From this selection of words consumers can assemble thousands of highly intelligible phrases or sentences suited for their products. The embarrassing phrase in our drawing is just one of the available options. The Digitalker speech synthesis system produces natural, high quality speech

by compressing and digitising human speech waveforms. The technique makes it inexpensive to manufacture machines that talk back to a user, bystander or passer-by.

The kits will work with either mechanical switches or with a microprocessor system and require only a simple amplifier and speaker for speech output. National Semiconductor sells the three chips for about $lOO.

With the ability to talk, a machine can inform, instruct, narrate, and even selfdiagnose. One of the first speech applications was for industrial alarm systems that can announce warnings and directions on how to escape. Many consumers in the United States are already familiar with talking dashboards that display and verbalise problems and instructions, such as “check oil level.” Office machines will soon verbalise their own symptoms or problems and then give directions on how to solve them: “Paper tray is empty, please refill.” In a quite different market, arcade games that narrate intergalactic battles are now available.

Another application for the talking chips is in supermarket point-of-sale terminals. National Semiconductor sell a scanning system, called POSitalker, that contains the Digitalker chips. The terminal calls out the prices of items as they are scanned or manually entered into the cash register. The voice comes from a speaker in the receipt printer and provides an immediate price confirmation for customers.

Talking machines are only the beginning of speech technology, says National Semiconductor. The next step is speech recognition. Though there are products available that feature speech recognition, the technique needs con-

siderable improvement. Words are often not easily recognised and, being boardsize rather than chip-siie, a lot of valuable space is required. In the next two years, however, with continued research in speech recognition techniques and circuit design, a chip will be able to listen as well as talk back.

Speech recognition involves not only the ability of a machine to comprehend verbal inputs, but to evaluate the information and respond — either verbally, with a speech chip, or visually, on a terminal display.

A word processor with speech recognition capability might respond to a command by simply displaying the requested information. For ex-

ample, an operator might say “edit file talking chips” and the file would be displayed on the screen.

On the other hand, for a system in which response to commands is not immediately visible, a spoken reply would confirm that action has been taken. For example, in making airline reservations over the telephone, a computer would receive the call, request information and listen to the answers. It would make the reservation and then give a verbal confirmation to the caller.

Indeed, in the next few years, the variety of machines that listen will be as limitless as those that talk.